The Gray Mouse and the Triple Murderess
by Kansas Faith
Summary: An incident involving Lila, Cassel, two new dead people, and a gray mouse leaves Lila pondering the differences between herself and Cassel.


**Author's Note:** Well, my second Curseworkers story. Sorry to any Canadians that may or may not be reading if I got something vastly wrong about your country. I dunno why I think Cassel and Lila would go to Quebec. I just do.

**Disclaimer:** All of this belongs to Holly Black and whoever are the publishers, and all that. So yeah.

They're taking an innocent stroll through a Canadian town about 40 minutes from Quebec City, called Saint-Raymond. Cassel jokes that his half-assed French is finally useful to him here, when he orders coffee for them, or asks for directions. Some of the people around here certainly know English, but their French is better. When they hear Cassel try to speak it, they seem touched by his blundering efforts and it seems to make them like him better.

Then of course, he can ask them for basically anything he wants.

The night is beautiful, if bitingly brisk. They've been in Canada for close to six months, and Lila knows that if they were back in New England, signs of spring would be poking out, the wind trying to become more friendly. But this far up north the only sign they see that it's the first of April is the calendar.

Not many people are around; it's a small town, with a small commercial district, and besides that, it's getting very late. They're here only for the second-hand bookstore they'd heard about from one of the neighbors in their apartment building. They're walking back from the store after closing time, one bag hanging from each of Cassel's hands, when they hear a car screech violently to a halt in the street behind them.

Time seems to get muddled then. Lila and Cassel both look behind them, drawn to the noise. They see three figures bounding out of a large SUV, and start running towards them. Lila has barely noticed the men have guns in their hands when Cassel has dropped the books and is grabbing her hand. "_Run_," he says.

And they do, but not far. No sooner have they passed a closed down DVD rental place than Lila feels her wrist get violently wrenched towards the ground. Cassel has been tackled by one of their attackers. He releases her hand to twist around and snap the wrist of his attacker backwards, sending the gun flying. It skitters away into the dark space between the DVD rental place and the building beside it as the other two men come rushing up. Lila goes for the gun as Cassel tries to buck the first man off of him.

"STOP!" Lila's fingers are tantalizingly close to the smooth metal of the pistol when she hears the click behind her. One of the three men is actually a woman, and she has her gun pointed right between Cassel's eyes. "Unless you want your boy friend to be blown away, I suggest you return that gun to its rightful owner, Ms. Zacharov."

Ms. Zacharov. So they know who she is, but the question remains: are they hunting her, or Cassel? Or both?

Cassel clears his throat. "I don't think he has much use for it right now." He nods to the man laying beside him, now out cold. Lila feels a proud grin try to force itself onto her face.

The woman scowls darkly at Cassel. "Give it to me, then." She says.

Lila doesn't hesitate. She chucks the pistol through the air to where it lands in the woman's waiting grip. "Who are you?" she asks. "And what right do you think you have to ruin a perfectly good vacation?" She can hear Cassel's snort at her word, 'vacation.' An extended one, maybe. A forced one definitely.

"I don't think you need to know who we are," the conscious guy speaks up at last. His hair is thinning and he possesses more freckles than Lila has ever seen on a grown man. "But we're here as a sort of favor. To someone who is not a fan of you or your father."

Lila should feel more anxious, but she can only be thankful they aren't here for Cassel. They don't know about him; they only know that they need Lila to get paid.

"You work for Brennan then," Cassel states. The attackers stare at him uncomfortably. He sighs, playing arrogant, impatient. "You wear the clothes of mobsters, you're Americans in French Canada. And you want to kill Lila Zacharov. You work for Brennan."

The woman quirks an eyebrow. She is definitely Latina, maybe in her 30's. "You're clever. I don't know who you are-but you're clever."

She swings her gun from Cassel to Lila. Lila sees Cassel stiffen. "You're right, we do work for Brennan. But it doesn't matter if you know that-you'll both be dead soon enough anyway."

Lila knows it's coming, the bullet, knows the woman will soon be pulling the trigger. She starts to lunge to the ground, prepared to tackle her, but Cassel acts first. In a blur of motion he has ripped his glove off with his teeth, and shoved his hand under the woman's pant cuff, bare fingers against bare ankle.

It starts immediately. The woman's eyes bug as her gun clatters to the ground and then she starts to go down with it, her bones cracking, her skin crawling, shifting. Lila grabs for the gun and tries not to watch as the human woman is forcefully pushed into the shape of a small gray mouse.

Lila's gun points at Freckles, but her eyes are fixed on Cassel; she figures her opponent will be too shocked to move for a few seconds anyway. Cassel is shaking. The blowback will come any moment.

Cassel knows it too, and there's urgency as he grinds out; "Lila-don't-you don't have to-" and then Cassel can't speak anymore. He no longer has a mouth, or indeed a distinguishable face.

_You don't have to kill him, _is what he was about to say. But as Lila's eyes flick up to the man's, she knows otherwise.

Freckles is horrified, watching Cassel as he shifts into something that sounds like it scuttles. Lila doesn't know what it is; she can't stand to watch.

"Hey! I think I'm the one you should be paying attention to right about now." The man's gaze swings to her, looking dazed.

"You have a…" Loud clattering noises coming from Cassel make them both jump, like the sound of multiple pennies being spilled onto the floor at once. Lila notices the mouse has stuck around, shivering on the asphalt.

"A transformation worker, yes we do." Lila's voice is clear and calm. She looks around, checks for cameras. She can't find any, and of course that makes sense; these people didn't want to get caught any more than she does now. Silencers on their guns, a get-away car. Dammit-she'll have to find the driver when she is done here, when she's got Cassel safely tucked away somewhere. And she'll have to make this quick, or the driver will come looking for her. "How did you know I was here? Who told you?" she asks. Business first.

The man still looks shaken, but is beginning to realize the gravity of his situation. "Aren't you going to kill me whether I tell you or not?"

"Yes. But I can make it a lot more painful."

He sneers. "Screw you, b-"

She shoots him in the kneecap.

Five minutes later, she's called her father and given him the name of the mole. Cassel has stopped shifting, and the two men have stopped breathing. The mouse finally had the sense to scamper, although where, Lila has no idea. The same goes for the driver of the SUV-when she'd gone back to the corner where they'd first been ambushed, the street was empty. At least she'd recovered their secondhand books from the asphalt.

She picks the lock to the rental place using a small tool she keeps in her purse. Dragging the two bodies into the building isn't easy, and waking Cassel is almost as hard. But there's no way she can move him, and they need to get out of there.

She tries not to laugh at the irony that while hiding out after killing someone, she's killed two more.

She taps his cheek, but he doesn't respond except to wince slightly. She pinches the skin on his hand and twists. This time, he groans and tries to swat her away. "Cassel!" she snaps. "Wake up."

His eyes slide open, two slits of muggy dark brown. "Lila."

"Yea, Cassel. We've got to move. I might have killed another person again." She says, trying lamely to joke. She regrets it immediately when she sees Cassel's face twist slightly. Guilt.

Only Cassel could be guilty when _she _shoots someone.

"Alright," he whispers. He's hoarse. "Let's get out of here. I think I might hurl."

An hour and a half later, and Cassel is unconscious again, although this time on the sofa in their apartment. Lila isn't sure on the procedure for Transformation blowback, and so just sits on the loveseat next to the couch, waiting for him to wake up.

On her lap sits one of the books they'd picked up that night, an old detective novel she'd found that told its story in English as opposed to the frequent French. The title is_ Detective Perry Mason and the Triple Murderess._ She has to love the irony; reading it would be almost to root against herself.

Cassel groans from the couch, and she leans forward, the book sliding to the floor. He blinks at the ceiling and then over at her. "Does this mean we have to leave Quebec?" he croaks.

She smiles. "I hope so."

He nods, weary. "Tell your father somewhere tropical would be nice. No one expects mobsters to be in Hawaii."

"He'll send you anywhere you want. I think you made him like you even more tonight."

Cassel looks surprised at that. "I didn't know your father ever liked me."

Lila nods. "In those rare moments when you weren't lying to him."

"So for about 5 minutes then."

She smiles at him. He clears his throat and gazes at the ceiling. "They're dead," he says.

Her smile dries up. "Of course they are, Cassel. What else did you expect me to do?"

He shakes his head. "I don't know-work them? Blackmail them? There must have been something else. There's always something else."

"I didn't have time to do anything else. And besides, they still could have gone to Brennan." She sighs and reaches for her tea on the coffee table. "It was either they die, or Brennan find out about you." She looks him in the eye, mismatched green and blue on black. "There wasn't even a choice."

That expression flits across his face again before he can stop it. Guilt again. Lila thinks of how he turned the Latina woman into a living thing, as opposed to an inanimate one. How he'd turned into Patton to avoid turning Patton into a dead man. And she thinks of how calm she herself had been when she'd sent the bullet between Freckles' eyes.

She never notices their differences so starkly as when they're to a back drop of death. She wonders what that says about their relationship.

Lila nudges her way onto the couch next to Cassel's hip and stares him down as she says, "You know how I am, Cassel. You know what I'm training to do."

He edges his way up the cushion behind him, at eye level with her now. "Yea, Lila, I get that."

"And you know I love you."

He grins crookedly, half-heartedly. "For whatever reason."

She shoves his arm. "For a lot of reasons, you jack-ass. And so yes, if you're in danger, I will kill people if I have to. You'll have to accept that."

"I've already accepted that. I'm not stupid, Lila." He says, irritable. "It's just, if I hadn't have been there tonight, those people wouldn't have had to die. You wouldn't have had to shoot them."

"No, I wouldn't have-because I'd have been dead."

He grimaces. "You know what I mean."

She shakes her head. "Such a martyr. I swear, Cassel, I wish I could get mad at you, but your reasons are so noble. You're the worst boyfriend ever, you know that?"

He reaches across the space between them to play with a lock of her hair. "Yea, I've been told."

"Oh really? By which girlfriend past?"

He laughs. "Sam."

"Now that's a story I need to hear." She settles on the couch with him, her head on his chest, and he begins a tale of Wallingford melodrama, of Dean Wharton having Alzheimer's, and a girl named Mina Lange.

Lila doesn't bring up the fact that she had kept one of the guns from that night, and its silencer, and has them stashed in the kitchen.

And Cassel doesn't mention how he had zipped the small gray mouse into his coat pocket while Lila had gone to check for the SUV driver, how he'd feigned sleep. And he doesn't tell her how the mouse is still there, waiting for him to decide what to do with her.


End file.
